So, as Gary might say, we were at
Stoney Finnart today. Finnart is a dive site at the foot of
Loch Long on the west coast of Scotland. It's a shore dive, and is quite commonly used for training as it's very easy to park, access, and dive. Quite often the car park can be pretty full, so I think that's where he gets the Stoney bit from! Then again, maybe it's the pile of junk scattered across the sea bed...
Anyway, let me introduce you to our two divers:
Gary is on the left, and myself on the right. FYI, we're both wearing Protect Explorer suits.
Here's some of the views. Up the loch:
And down the loch:
Gary is taking part 1 of tech 1 soon, so he's keen to get a bit of relevant practice in. Finnart takes a while to get any depth - the pictures above show the tide alost fully out - but pretty soon it starts sloping off to +25m meters (I've never bothered to go deeper as there's nothing there, that I know of).
Anyway, we kicked out for a bit until we thought we were in about 6m-9m of water and started our descent. Gary was leading everything today, so we started off with a 3m/min descent, arriving at the bottom in 7m of water. The visibility at Finnart can be pretty bad, but I was surprised to find it was ~6m; quite pleasant really.
We carried out some valve and s-drills, and they went quite well. Gary has been having trouble with stiff valves on his twinset recently, but after some lubing during the week, they were really working easily for him today. The first s-drill was a bit rushed, but we sorted that out and ran through the drill again. A bit of line was then run; just basic out and back in.
After a while of mooching around the various bits of scrap and concrete blocks, we headed down to 21m and started an ascent. I was quite surprised to find ambient light at 21m, as it's usually pretty pitch black down there. Plan was to do 3m/min to the surface, with a few minutes at 6m, and maybe some valve drills. By about 15m the ascent was getting a little scrappy, so we just continued 3m/min, stopped at 6m for 3 minutes, and then 3m/min to the surface. Today the tide wasn't running much at all, so we didn't move much from the dive site; probably about a 2min-3min fin back to the shallows.
We got our sandwiches and hot drinks out during the surface interval and discussed the dive, and the plan for the next dive. Here's a man deep in thought, visualizing the next dive:
We even managed to locate and explore a new cave system:
But enough of that, on with the 2nd dive.
The plan for the 2nd was pretty much the same as the 1st except no line laying.
We did another descent drill into similar depths as before, then the usual valve and s-drills. After this we ended up running a litte bit of line, but this time using a spool. Between 16m and 20m there's 4 very very large platforms made out of concrete, typically L shaped, though one of them does have a large 'A' frame coming out of it. On this dive we spent at few minutes looking around one of them at 18m before beginning another ascent.
This ascent went a lot better that the previous. Everything was a lot more controlled, and during our stop at 6m, both of us carried out a valve drill before surfacing.
All in all, a good day out. Though Finnart isn't the most exciting site around, it's only about 1h 25mins from my house, and serves us well enough for practice. Perfect.
Though I wasn't actively looking around for wildlife during the dives, I did spot lots of crabs, squat lobsters, prawns, and a pretty large cod. Can usually find some congers eels, and various types of flat fish at Finnart. So much to see, just need to open your eyes to it.
andy